1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication systems, and more particularly to dynamically determining the optimal communication message bundle size for a wireless communications system based on, paging message traffic, system resource utilization parameters, and paging message response delays within the system.
2. Statement of Related Art
Essential functions of a communication system, such as a network wireless system, include controlling, processing, and billing the calls completed by the system's customers. Maximizing the number of calls completed, while minimizing the system overheads, is an important competitive consideration for such a system. The KBHCA (thousands of busy hour call attempts) capacity of a system is a key indicator of the revenue potential of the system. The system must be reliable and take a minimal amount of time to set-up calls and hand-offs.
In a wireless communication system, there are two types of calls: mobile station originated calls and mobile station terminated calls. The mobile station terminated calls involve paging of possibly all cell sites, which, in turn, broadcast the messages to all mobile stations served by these cells. In order to establish a mobile-terminated call, a response to the paging message must be received from the mobile phone within a pre-determined time period. This time period is referred to as the round-trip paging response delay. Paging traffic depends on the system-wide mobile termination traffic. The other call control messages depend mostly on the nature and duration of a call. Paging unfortunately requires significant system resources throughout the system. An effective paging strategy reduces these overheads and therefore makes resources available for call control tasks so that more calls can be completed using a given network wireless communication system deploying various technologies such as TDMA, CDMA, GSM and AMPS.
The key to larger call control processing capacity for an application processor ("AP") is in reducing the paging overheads, such as message processing latencies and transmission delays. The bundling of paging messages reduces such paging overheads. Bundling combines a set of paging messages into a single larger message to take advantage of the reduction in CPU overheads that result compared to processing pages message-by-message. Bundling requires paging messages to be withheld for a period of time. During this delay period, the network resources for the mobile station to mobile station call gets delayed, which wastes network resources that could be used for other calls. In addition, quality of service deteriorates when call processing messages are unduly delayed.
As the bundle size is decreased, the processing delay for paging messages will decrease, however, the processing resource overhead per paging message will increase. As the bundle size increases, the bundling delay will increase, but the amount of system resources used for processing a particular number of pages will decrease.
Prior art bundling methods used in wireless communication systems typically wait for either a pre-determined period of time to elapse or for a pre-determined number of paging messages to be received before broadcasting those messages to the mobile units in the system.
As such, it is an object of this invention to dynamically select an optimal bundle size such that the system resources used and the delay introduced by the bundling messages together are both minimized.